OP-ED in defense of Online Learning

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/08/02/online-courses-good-person-classes?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=00cfcd18fe-IDL20170802&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-00cfcd18fe-197508093&mc_cid=00cfcd18fe&mc_eid=dae4c13144

Video Games and Education

A recent article from Inside Higher Education on video games in teaching. An interesting, informative article, that mostly outlines the place game-based learning currently is in the "wave" model of education. You know that model; what's the next wave that's going to solve every problem we have today, and all the problems we'll have tomorrow? A friend who teaches in secondary education refers to this is the "miracle de jur," by which he means the pedagogy sponsored  by the consultant his district just paid 10K to come for a weekend, that everyone will slavishly follow for three to four years until they realize that it didn't solve any of their problems and hire a new consultant.

Gaming is at the beginning of the enthusiasm wave, which means it has its enthusiasts and its detractors. The IHE ariticle is surprisingly balanced. I guess the author has seen too many miracle de jurs pass by. I particularly like the distinction she makes between game-based learning and gamification. I have to admit to a prejudice against gamification. I find it a less than palatable word, and not simply because it is so uncomfortable on the tongue and jarring to the ear.  

"More than Fun?" by Sharon O'Malley.
file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/Games/Educational%20games%20expand%20classroom%20learning.htm

Multimedia Resources Around the Web

Open Culture 

"The best free cultural & educational media on the web."

The School of Life

"The School of Life is a place that tries to answer the great questions of life. We believe in developing emotional intelligence. We are based online and in 12 physical hubs around the world, including London, Melbourne, Istanbul and Seoul"

Prelinger Archives

"Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division."

 Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division

"The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS) is responsibile for the acquisition, cataloging and preservation of the Library's motion picture and television collections. The Moving Image Research Center to provides access and information services to an international community of film and television professionals, archivists, scholars and researchers. Our holdings complement the audio recordings served in the Recorded Sound Research Center."

Descriptions are from the websites. 

DRC (Digital Rhetoric Collaborative) Call for Blog Carnival Contributions

Call for Blog Carnival Contributions: The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Publishing:

http://www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org/2016/09/20/call-for-blog-carnival-contributions-the-past-present-and-future-of-digital-publishing/

"Breaking the 'Iron Triangle'" from Inside Higher Education

I'm not sure about this project. The desire to teach more students with better outcomes is laudable. The desire to do this without spending more money, when we know we're spending money on things that have nothing to do with education--yes, college football, fancy dorms and rec centers, etc. And don't forget how administrative costs continue to rise. know some complain about professors who do more research than teach, and I admit, that can be a problem as well. What bothers me with this project is that we seem to be insisting that the classroom isn't our priority, at least when it comes to what we're going to spend out money on. The gist of this article seems to be, let's teach better--Let's teach more students better--as long as we don't have to spend more money. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/17/flipped-classroom-project-north-carolina-greensboro-produces-promising-results?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=11262092fa-DNU201608017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-11262092fa-197508093&mc_cid=11262092fa&mc_eid=fa5284ca01

Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities

Not sure if this article qualifies as online learning, but when someone is this angry, it makes good reading:


https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/

Makerspaces

Ah, those librarians, quietly joining, or perhaps fomenting, a revolution. 

A few links on Makerspaces:

http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/a-librarians-guide-to-makerspaces/

http://library-maker-culture.weebly.com/what-are-they.html

http://makered.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Makerspace-Playbook-Feb-2013.pdf

http://renovatedlearning.com/makerspace-resources/

So, are Makerspaces, sometimes referred to as Hackerspaces, f2f or online? Are they a hybrid of the two? Is one possible without the other?  

The Electronic Word

Published in 1993. To long ago to be pertinent to the digital world twenty some-odd years later? Or worth checking out? It's in the library, so at least a trip across campus. QA76.9.C66 L363 1994, Brownsville Stacks. Theory tends to be more durable than technology. So, possibilities.  

 

Richard A. Lanham

302 pages | 4 halftones, 2 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 1993

The personal computer has revolutionized communication, and digitized text has introduced a radically new medium of expression. Interactive, volatile, mixing word and image, the electronic word challenges our assumptions about the shape of culture itself.

A Language of Play

 Raul sent this to me the other day. Grading right now, so no time to pick up something at random to read. I'll put it here and come back to it later.

"A Language of Play: New Media’s Possibility Spaces." Joshua Daniel-Wariya. Computers and Composition 40 (2016) 32–47. The link below will take you to the abstract on Science Direct, which seems to think we're willing to pay 31 dollars for a journal article. Many university libraries carry Computers and Composition on a database. If not, inter-library loan is always an option. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2016.03.011

The MIT Online Educational Policy Initiative

Anyone who taught in a computer classroom in the 90s remembers how those classrooms always seemed to be made for doing something other than teaching. They were designed by technicians ostensibly for teachers. Unfortunately, most of the time, those technicians had never themselves taught, so their designs often didn't fit our needs. As often happens in academia, the designs fit the dimensions of some room in the basement where the computer lab was--right next to the Writing Center, and just as difficult to find.

For those of us who taught writing, the layout was even more foreign, since those rooms always seemed to be set up like a lecture, something we'd long since moved away from. We couldn't rearrange those computer desks in a circle for class discussion or in multiple circles for group work. I remember asking all the students to pull their chairs up to the front of the room and squeeze together. Thank goodness the chairs all had wheels.

So, it's no surprise to me that the MIT study came to the conclusion that we should, "focus on people and process, not technology" (IHE). In other words, teaching should guide technology, not technology guide teaching. Surprise.


MIT Online Education Policy Initiative: https://oepi.mit.edu/final-report

Summary in Inside Higher Education (if you don't have time to read the whole report): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/20/mit-online-learning-report-notes-importance-teachers-instructional-designers?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=f4741c5510-DNU20160420&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-f4741c5510-197508093

Drive By Book Review: The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture

The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture, Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson.

With it's bright orange cover, The State of Play immediately announces that overly subtle academiceze will not be in play--though insight and intelligence is widely displayed. This little book contains 13 diverse essays that, as the title suggests, explores video game culture from the inside. 

Forget Fox Channel clichés about video games causing violence. This issue isn’t ignored; it’s handled in a sophisticated enough way that, as Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh write in “The Joy of Virtual Violence,” “It's the rest of the world that needs to catch up” (155).

Essays range from straight on commentaries on gender discrimination—a more critical issue than violence for most gamers—representation of race and ethnicity, to esoteric explorations of identity, as in Ola Wikander’s “The God in the Machine”:  

“There is an interesting relationship that can be imagined between this type of Gnostic mythology and the role of the video game player in relation to the character he or she plays. Just like the fallen human soul described by Gnostic religions, the video game player steps into a false world that only exists for as long as one believes in it” (246).

Twine: an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

I've been playing with Twine (http://twinery.org/).

From their website:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.


I found the stories I was most attracted to were the nonlinear (not necessarily plot-based) stories that explicitly took advantage of the format. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

http://www.fahlstaff.com/

https://sub-q.com/play-a-man-in-his-life/

http://www.magicalwasteland.com/the-arboretum
I'm playing round with the possibility of using Twine to deliver instruction online. Could lecture notes, even lectures, become interactive using Twine. I'll play with the possibilities this summer.